Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Category Archives: YouTube

What happens when grandpa decides to read his grandson a different book, one from George R. R. Martin? Or, maybe, what would The Princess Bride look like if HBO had done it? (Scenes from the Game of Thrones series may not be safe for work.)

CCP has been good… if somewhat sporadic… about sharing interesting data and statistics about EVE Online. We have had everything from economic reports to tidbits on how many players were in a huge battle or how many ships some new NPCs have blown up.

CCP came up with a new one, a video showing the age distribution of its player base done as a video, with each frame being a bi-daily snap shot of the data, covering the game from 2003 to present day.

If your eyesight is anything like mine, you’ll have to go to the video on YouTube, turn it up to 1080p, and then watch it full screen. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

The basic take away is that the population of New Eden is getting older over time, even as it has been growing in population. Both the mean and median age go up by a few years over the course of the video. More interesting for me though is the 95 percentile number, which comes pretty close to tracking my own age over time. It starts out a few years ahead of me, gets a bit closer by 2006 when I start playing the game, and I about catch up by the end of the video.

I do not suppose there is really anything earth shattering in that data. The population of the game is growing older, no doubt in part because it is one of those games you can stick with for years and year. It would be interesting to compare this against other long running MMOs, if the data was available.

EVE Online can be a boring game. You can spend a long time with tedious mechanics and annoying people and wonder what others see in the game. And then one of these sorts of moments comes and something big happens, something that changes the game for you. You make a big score. You with a desperate battle. You escape that gate camp against the odds. An operation goes off as planned, or goes horribly wrong. And the hook is set. Then you go sit on that titan or duck into that low sec system or camp that gate or shoot that tower, not knowing whether or not the operation will be a snooze or another of those peaks. And even if the op is dull, it *could* have been one of those ops, and you would have hated to miss it.

When it comes to watching gaming related videos on YouTube, I must admit that I do not have much patience. Small screen video, bad audio commentary, and a general inability to grab and hold the interest of any viewer not captivated by shiny colors and an overbearing sound track pushes me to reject just about anything that demands more than 5 minutes of my time in the medium.

Some of that is my MTV generation attention span, but a larger part is resentment that some poorly produced nonsense is demanding my full attention as it spews out its low quality efforts onto my computer screen. I can tolerate armature podcasts… well, some armature podcasts… because at least they only require me to listen. But demanding eyes and ears and mind for crap, that is asking too much.

Rooks and Kings is a small PvP alliance in null sec that, through skill and innovative tactics, is able to take on much larger alliances and win fights.

And they can make decent videos. Their latest effort is over an hour long and I sat and watched the whole thing. It is a documentary describing how the alliance had to alter its tactics to deal with the ever larger fleets it had to contend with, how they came up with and evolved the tactic called pipe bombing, and then how effective it ended up becoming.

If you are interested in seeing a small group smash much larger fleets, describing how they did it, and playing audio of the victims (who in most cases express admiration at being so done in) this is a worthwhile watch.

Related to things discussed in this video are a couple of shorter videos, The Drebuchet,The False Tower, and War Crimes in Fountain. The latter documents the time that Mister Vee got pipe bombed after mocking his fellow CFC FCs who had been roughly handled by Rooks and Kings. I was in a fleet later that day and people were talking about that action.